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Wednesday, 30 December 2015

There are too many people, wet people, dry people, all bang bang banging in like a pack procession of zombies at a door you must plank up fastly, running to the door with bolts and nails. You must understand I am not one of those misanthropists for they in fact love people-dribbling, scrabbling they rat mouth on and on of their contempt of society only when there is an audience, oblivious of the exhaustion that is engagement, a true misanthropist would not call themselves such a thing as they would not speak to you at all.I am beautiful and young and I have long dark hair and I am beautiful and young and I have long dark hair because I am my own muse as well as author, man as well as woman, I can love myself and love myself I will do. (And well).I ate French toast with maple syrup and bacon and she asked me if I ever doubted myself and I said no because I didn’t but also because I had no intention of being myself with her. It is a world war one anniversary and a Canadian says he doesn’t care for it but no one cares for him so it doesn’t matter so much. And the rest of my notes are badly written as my motor neurons are badly written and all I can make out is ‘dirt and amputation to sound impressive and a teddy bear farting in an old fashioned picture book’. So make of that what you will guess.Matt asked me if I bought my Mum a father’s day card. I said no. I told her the story. She laughed. Of course I have to be both mother and father she said.

And criminality is a sort or originality, a sort of economic artistry, so I can say that my families are blue bloods in that sense. I think I am my own both. My body is for me only. I am a self-sustaining organism, a plant cell splitting in half to form a whole.When I went North, North, North. I saw a mountain that looked like a mountain that looked like a story that looked liked a woman that was a story and also a person and also like actually just some rocks that tourists pointed at and took pictures of. And I write down in my note book with the bulbasaur stickers on ‘a mountain woman, bushy breasted, twin peaked: the Scots would marry the land if they could but I am an Englishman thru and thru, tho I am neither English nor a man. I lick the toes, kiss the soles of blighty, my puke green pleasant land and tip my imaginary top hat and say bury me in blighty old bean to no one in particular.’ I won’t type the rest out as it is not words, just pictures of clouds and sheep and flowers.

Monday, 14 December 2015

My essay for Doll Hospital Issue Two! Also like obligatory there are 150+ pages of content and 99% of them don't include me talking about my deep personal connection with Jesse Pinkman so like go read that instead.

more than anything else in the world and I do not want abuser aesthetics in my house.

But as much as This Bridge Called My Back is my bible I am interested in occupying

these white guys’ characters. Stealing their toys, their clothes, their lines. Jackson

Pollock said ‘I am Nature’ and I reply with ‘I am Jackson Pollock’.

I am also Jesse Pinkman. Because Jesse survives. And is fictitious. I also survive.

And am ficticuous. However, the Jesse Pinkman blogging hashtag is less popular

than the Bernard Black blogging one. This is most likely because it centres around

substance abuse and takes place at 5am. Jesse is a survivor and Bernard is a survivor. But

Charlie Kelly is the most survivor, the most me. The dude survived his own abortion.

When I was suicidal the other week I wrote:

“It’s not that I want to die. I want to go further. Suicide is still a selfhood, theultimate in fact. I wish I had never been conceived. I don’t want to exist even inidea form. Everyone said I should have been aborted – the family, the doctors. theywere quite right. They were quite right. Noun. Noun. Noun.”

So we have the abortion thing in common. Also his learning difficulties, his

trauma, his cats, the absent fathers and dodgy literacy skills. His height and high-
pitched voice. His mania. His army jacket and neurovariance. I also used to clean up

human waste for money. (Though being a cleaner of colour carried a different context

I suppose). Charlie responds to childhood abuse not with a TED talk but with a

magical musical written in crayon. I use crayon in all my artwork. I offered to give

one to my mum and she said no thank you. Suicide attempts are horcruxes –

you lose yourself one try at a time. But horcruxes are also fragments of the soul.

Containments. Parts lost given back to you in unexpected packages. Your writing, your

pet, a TV character on a strange sitcom that is yours too you kno, you just didn’t realise it

before you hit play.

People say I am strong. But I am not strong. People say I am inspiring. But I am not

inspiring. I am not an MIA gif set. Or a pair of Frida Kahlo socks. There is a particularly

colonial thumbprint on the caricature of the strong woman of colour. For I am not strong,

but suicidal. And I do not want my perpetual debasement to serve as a catalyst to the very

model of white authorship that made me sick in the first place. I do not want my vomit

chunks used to paint masterpieces. I do not want that one bit.

Charlie Kelly is not a strong woman of colour. He eats garbage out of the trash.

Bernard Black is not a strong woman of colour. He has mushrooms growing out

of his hair. Jesse Pinkman is not a strong woman of colour. He is well...he is Jesse

Pinkman! Survival is not inspiring, it is repulsive, and it is always the rats that run

first, the cockroachs that survive. I am a rat. A cockroach. A parasite. (Parasitic lifestyle

blogging is another hashtag that is dear to me.) And Charlie crawls around the sewers

of Philadephia with no clothes on.

And a bonus playlist! Again made into ART by Mikael. He couldn't actually fit all the songs into one playlist so consider the extra like 34 songs a suprise?!

Our second issue featuring contributions and interviews from awesome people such as Bassey Ikpi, Dior Vargas, Gemma Correll, Cindy L. Rodriguez, L’lerrét Jazelle Ailith, Allison Augustyn and Yumi Sakugawa. It is 155 pages full colour of soothing illustrations, comic art, poetry, fiction, literary essays and real talk. We think it is beautiful, we think it is necessary, and we hope you do too.

Our suggested donation amount for the digital copy of the journal is £5.00, however there is also a pay as you wish option in the drop down menu if you'd like to pay more or less.

Every order comes with a soundcloud mix of our fave self care songs to soothe you on sad days!

YAY! YAY!

Also I had an interview with Hannah over at Dazed on all things DH! Check it out if you wanna!

Thursday, 19 November 2015

[Paper presented at the November 2015 Cine-Excess Conference at Brighton University-this research is a part of my PHD research on trauma, digital spaces and child abuse.]

CW: themes of csa

There are unspoken
rules of the Internet: don’t post anything online you wouldn’t want your
grandmother to see, the penis enlargement email in your spam box is almost
certainly a scam, and the most socially active, in this hyper connected realm
of the digital, are undoubtedly the most lonely of us all. Because, whilst
seemingly rooted in the technical, the shame, viscera and banalities that
define the digital world makes it, not post-human, but deeply human in all the creepy, ‘perverted’ ways we might not care
to admit. (Though of course the very term human itself is a flabby, capricious
and moveable one and certainly a concept to be picked apart with pliers another
time).

As a result, in
defining this amorphous concept of ‘the Internet’ I follow the findings of the
Meme Factory collective, an American group of Internet researchers, who argue
in their self-titled 2014 book that:

“The internet is
people. Made by, used by, inﬂuenced by, and everything-else’d by people. In an
atoms-to-quarks-style reduction, its smallest constituent part is the
person…There is absolutely no aspect of the internet that does not have its
origin in human intent.”[1]

This question of ‘human intent’ is of
particular interest when applied to the subject of trauma, that blanket term to
describe all manner of ills, which in my own research I have hinged on one specific ‘kind’ of ‘trauma’, childhood sexual abuse,
which I have explored in two incarnations:

-The first, psychic trauma:

The effects of such incidences of abuse on the individual psyche.

(Again the very notion of the individual psyche poses its own
questions, but a twenty-minute presentation has its limits).

-The second cultural trauma:

National anxieties in American English speaking communities on the
subject of online child predators (as well as pre-existing ‘offline anxieties).

Because the
Internet is not beyond the borders of geography or colonial history, the
nuances, humor and interests of Syrian social media possess distinct, but not
necessarily differing, signifiers than the average Minnesota Reddit user. This
is not to offer a sense of cultural essentialism, itself a deeply colonial
construct, but rather to question the notion that the English speaking Internet
is the neutral default, for that presumption itself contributes to a white
washing that it is important to not just simply avoid, but actively destroy.

So, with terms
defined, we can progress to the focus of this paper, my Internet monster of
choice, which I hope can help us understand questions of childhood sexual abuse
and the traumatic imagination.

This is Pedo Bear, who is considered by Meme Factory as “the
characterization of pedophilia on the web.”[2]
Originating on the Japanese message board 2chan, as a character created from key board
symbols to signify an attention seeking user, it took on new meaning when it
found its way to the largely unmoderated space of its American counterpart, 4chan. Here it was
originally posted as a warning to moderators that child pornography was being,
or about to be, posted and was also used to mock the issue of pedophilia as a
whole. As American Internet academic Whitney Phillips explains: “Sometimes
drooling, sometimes sweating, sometimes featuring a sombrero or the words “DO
WANT,” Pedobear is always scrambling towards something. It is not until one
realizes precisely what he is chasing after that his form takes on new
significance.”[3]

Now, the very fact
that the internet even has a humorously cartoonish incarnation of childhood
sexual abuse is revealing in and of itself, and whilst ‘off colour’ humor and
an ambiguous public interest in pedophilia certainly predates the Internet, it is
clear that this figure is rooted in the realm of the digital. This highlights
the popularity of what Meme Factory describes as ‘Transgressive Media’ in online spaces, which they
define as: “acts or situations known by the poster to exceed the comfort
level—or emotional, mental, or gastronomical tolerances of the
intended audience.”[4] This
notion of exceeding comfort levels is a revealing one with Meme Factory
explaining that subversive and provocative images are not only intended to
“shock and upset” but also “constitute a brag [for] the original
poster” as if to say, “Look what terribleness I can endure”. [5]

This model of
digital desensitization where “high tolerance is a hallmark of active community
members” needs to be understood in terms of not just the blasé viewer seeking
out gore and gross out videos, but also the unwilling spectator who accidentally
views such content. Adrian Chen explains this process in the case of Goatse, a
widely circulated pornographic meme. Chen says:

“The photo was the original Internet
bait-and-switch: Share a link to a hot girl, a cute puppy, but— boom—it's
Goatse instead. Goatse'ing someone without their consent is emotional assault.
It's also funny as shit.”[6]

Whilst undoubtedly
unwilling viewers precede the Internet, and certainly many individuals would have
been pressured, or tricked into, an ill fated viewing of ‘Faces of Death’ and
other ‘video nasties’ in the past, however this space of jump scares and shock
links are a distinctly digital development in how we consume objects of horror.
Meme Factory emphasize this online development, stating:

“More to the
point, audiences of classical folklore are likely consuming horror stories of
their own free will. Viewers of online transgressive media are often eﬀectively
being surprised by an unseen and malevolent source.”[7]

This question of
virtual survivors and unwilling viewers begs the question that if scary movies
operates as ‘safe’ terror are gross internet videos and rape joke memes ‘safe’
trauma? Because whilst this media is not created for the benefit of childhood
sexual abuse survivors, the language of Internet interactions with its talk of
‘Facebook rape’ (a ‘humorous’ term for posting something embarrassing,
unflattering or out of character on another person’s Facebook wall without
their consent), catch phrases of ‘your resistance only makes my penis harder’
when engaging in trolling activities, the sordid browsing history to be deleted,
incognito modes to go unseen, the popularity of jump scares (seemingly innocent
videos with a frightening shock or loud noise at the end to alarm its
unsuspecting viewer) all begs the question of whether trauma is not simply in
the content but in the code itself.

In this sense we could argue that on the
Internet everyone is an abuser and everything is abuse. From the shadow web to
Facebook in its talk of replication, desensitization, identity splitting and
incoherent repetition we are presented with the childhood sexual abuse psyche. And
much like a high school teacher might urge their students never to cite Wikipedia,
our culture of victim blaming consistently reminds us never to trust a survivor
of sexual violence. Because not only does the trauma as meme model exemplify
the first as tragedy then as farce narrative so brilliantly-something I hope
can be used to allow survivors to question notions of the authentic trauma and
subvert oppressive notions of respectability- it also allows internet users to
log in to these spaces of trauma on a casual basis-allowing non-survivors to be
voluntarily (or involuntarily) traumatized by a horror they may not have
experienced ‘irl’.

This brings us
back toPedo Bearwhere the predator is punch line and parody, an interactive space to
ambiguously engage in an imagined, imminent assault. Let’s begin with the
obvious, the figure is a cartoon teddy bear, a child’s toy, a potential Disney
mascot, something coded as a friendly figure in the space of American
capitalist culture, with the original teddy even being based on the benevolence
of a former U.S. president. Hardly the collective image of child molestation,
except paradoxically that it is, as I remind you that this meme has been
described as “the characterization of pedophilia on the web”, making the
creature both the antithesis and the embodiment of childhood sexual abuse.

This itself can
serve as a cartoonish incarnation of Slavoj Žižek’s argument that “If something
gets too traumatic, too violent, even too filled with enjoyment, it shatters
the coordinates of our reality. We have to fictionalise it. ”[8]
In Scott Heim’s 1995 novel Mysterious Skin and Gregg Araki’s 2005 film
adaptation of the same name we find the fantastical figure of alien abduction becomes
both signifier and stand in for the trauma of childhood sexual abuse. Pedo Bear
in his shocking brutality and playful persona can be seen to operate on the
same system.

Because
astechnology writer Nick Douglasobserves inhis essay ‘A Beginner's
Guide to Pedobear, the Internet's Favorite Pervert’ he explains: “The
brilliance of the Pedobear mythos is that none of it is apparent in the picture
of this innocent picture of a teddy.”[9]
Here the theme is not evident in the image, the wide eyed bear, but in the
text, or rather the second part of the text, as the Pedo Bear meme structure
relies on a pedophilic punch line. Much like a knock-knock joke relies on a
reply of ‘who’s there’ Pedo Bear’s innocent set up of a teddy bear image and a
familiar opening line requires a grotesque twist. For instance, line one: ‘stay
in school’, line two: ‘it would be easier for me to find you’, and so on. This
acts in support of horror and trauma theorist Adam Lowenstein’s point that “Walter
Benjamin’s claims that the caption may be “the most important component of the
shot”. For Benjamin, “the caption is related to the photographer’s guilt to
“uncover guilt and name the guilty in his pictures.”[10]
This sense of guilt, naming, revelation and projection are developed further by
Douglas when he states: “Pedobear's like a curse word: A picture of a teddy
bear is only as offensive as the meaning it's given.”[11]

This push and pull
relationship between the simple and the complicated, the mocking and the
affirming, the innocent and the degraded draws parallels with other models of
transgressive social interaction, most notably the act of trolling, the art of
willfully exposing or mocking an unsuspecting user through playfully devious
forms of off topic interactions. As Whitney Phillips explains, online trolling
work “is simultaneously cruel and amusing and aggressive and playful and real
and pretend and hurtful and harmless, as are the trolls themselves. It really
is as simple and as complicated as that.”[12]

Many frustrated
internet users would argue that it is Pedo Bear himself who is simple and the
offline audiences, unaware of online norms and transgressive tastes, who are
making it complicated. As Douglas argues “Pedobear is just a character made
to mock pedophilia. And like anything interesting on the Internet,
he's often feared and grossly misunderstood.”[13]
Examples of these offline misunderstandings are numerous and due to limits of
time I shall only cite one example.

This is Pedo Bear in a primary school. Pedo Bear’s inconspicuous nature has already been highlighted, and
it is this very nature that has resulted in him popping up in unexpected
places, the creator unaware of his meaning, when stripped of the unsavoury text
that serves as his revelation. As a result, the bear has been unintentionally
included in a range of
mainstream media from a front-page cover story on the 2010 Olympics to a Conservative column
on Barack Obama.

However, as stated before, a particularly striking example, due to its setting,
is when Pedo Bear found its way into a New Zealand primary school in 2012, displayed on a
poster for an extended period of time. “No-one on our staff had any idea what
this thing represented," states the school’s head master, Paul Irving, in
a statement to the New Zealand Herald, serving as a revealing parallel to the
anxiety inducing idea that real abusers often insidiously position themselves
in plain sight as heads of families and pillars of communities.[14]

In this sense,
Pedo Bear in all his contradictions, misunderstandings and constant movements
serves as a bridge between all manner of online media, mapping the seemingly
unconnected spaces, from cute cat memes to illegal snuff videos, Pedo Bear
occupies it all, and I believe this peculiar character can help us better
understand both national and individual issues of childhood sexual abuse, both
online and off.